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PAGE 11

​I regarded this drawing as quite a challenging undertaking at the time.  This is not a drawing of an actual scene, but rather an accretion of various real items into an imagined whole.  It may not seem like much; but for me it meant wandering the streets, “collecting” visual bric-a-brac to stuff into this street view.  In fact, I spent much of the next year or so always carrying a camera so as to be able to photograph mundane objects “just in case” I might need to put them into a drawing.

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At last, the point of view tilts up -  from the previous pages’ looking downward.  It seems the unspooling cassette tape has finally reached a destination: the mail box. (more on that later)  After 10 pages of rather cramped and claustrophobic compositions we at last have something resembling a vast environment.  At the time I meant for this to be the “narrator’s” (the dreamer, Kid Sid; we still don’t know who or what “he” is) vision of being out in the actual world.  Yet this is hardly Manhattan at rush hour.  It is all but deserted.  Is our “narrator” some kind of possum-like nocturnal animal?

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The phone connectivity idea is carried through with the phone booth.  We now see the wires that tie it all together.  There is also an additional device now: the television.  I am deliberately introducing the cliche of TV’s playing in the store window.  They are like mini alternate visual realities beckoning for attention like sirens.  This is another, slightly different kind of connectivity.  I placed the fire alarm pole in the foreground to indicate that there was another way the person on the street could be “wired” right into a hub of larger human activity.  Just pull a lever and people will respond. I also liked the kind of the impending emergency vibe that it might give off. Gamewell looks like the kind of name I would make up; but I believe it was an actual brand I came across.

When I was originally thinking of beginning this project I lived in that hideous little studio apartment in NW Portland that I mentioned earlier.  Due to an unfortunate series of events, I was (for a few months) without the car that I had counted on having when I decided to move to this more urban area of the city across town from Reed College.  I instead had to catch the last bus from Reed to downtown at around 1:30 AM; and then, if all went well, I would walk the last mile up the hills from downtown to my neighborhood by around 2:30. This was during Portland’s well known extended rainy season; and my route followed West Burnside, the street that was the city’s version of skid row.  It was cold.  It was damp. I had bronchitis that wouldn’t quit for (literally)  weeks.  It was depressing and deserted in just this way.  One can see landmarks from this nightly walk: Holmes Drugs, Moe’s Pianos and Volvo (a huge neon construction that still hovers above that neighborhood even today).  My route actually did take me past  a TV store just a block or two from my building.

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The scene is stuffed with little private-joke names.  Some are meaningful; others are used simply because the signs needed to say something.  The striped awning is modeled on one that was on the front of a hardware store near Reed.  Wah Wah Taysee Travel refers to an island near my family’s summer cabin in Georgian Bay, Ontario. The phone booth is in fact a reproduction of the one closest to this cabin that would we would have to travel to in order to contact the wider world.  66 High Street is the address of the apartment building in Mississauga, Ontario where I worked as a janitor and groundskeeper during the summer of 1979. The intersection of Morris and Chestnut as shown in the street signs is a reference to addresses where I lived in Albany, NY. 16 Chestnut Hill Road was where I grew up from 1967-1980.  Morris Street was where I lived in the summer of 1981.  Coulsen’s is the name of a convenience store/news stand where I often shopped in Albany. 1172 on the firebox is a reference to my college mailbox number. The visual is reminiscent of Portland, but the streets and other items are meant to refer to points back East.  Where exactly did I live anyway? It seems I moved every 4 months or so.  Maybe for me it was a way of demonstrating that I felt uprooted; but for our narrator it is really more of an expression that he is here, there, and everywhere all at once.

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The car was again a horrible problem for me to draw.  The foreshortening made it even harder.  My old 1973 Pinto was by 1982 consigned to the scrap heap and my only access to it (other than memory) was through rough sketches from years earlier. The following year I finally stumbled upon a tomato red version of this car in my Portland neighborhood of Eastmoreland, and I was able do a slightly better job with it; but, here...ugh!  It is as though the bottom half of the car is missing.  And, of course, it is the car with license KS CTX again - and still with no driver.  Interesting to note that it looks like the cassette tape symbol is about to get run over by yet another apparent recurring symbol, the car.

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In considering the whole arc of the story I think it is useful to compare this to the scene on pages 39-40.  They are meant to be drawings of the same “place,” the street scene with the TV store and newspaper boxes.  Of course the two drawings look very different.  I will say much more about the differences when describing that drawing rather than this one.  At this point I simply want to say that this is the more generic version.  It is generic because that is about the best I could accomplish at the time and also this may be the way the individual I am calling our “narrator” actually sees it.

PAGE 12

​I was very dissatisfied with the workmanship on this page.  It is definitely the sloppiest of the 42 pages.  I had allowed myself the 9 days of Reed’s Fall Break to complete pages 11 and 12.  As this week of 12 hour drawing days came to a close I realized that I would have to rush to get it done; and it shows.  Attention to straight edge and shapes of smaller scale objects got sacrificed here and there - particularly in the top left frame.  Integrating the inside and outside perspective systems just didn’t happen.  I took the time to set up precisely what would be in the rearview mirrors (both of them); but when I tried to put these details in the final drawing, the images seem to turn to overworked mush.  Resorting to a kind of scribbled vertical slash for shading proved very ineffective when it was used to shade detailed surfaces.  One positive technical note: the Pinto is starting to look almost like a Pinto in the top right frame; but the hubcap...ugh!



The top left frame’s car interior has the word PINTO inscribed in the lower door jam; but this interior is that of a 1981 Subaru GL, the car I was driving in 1982.  In the same way that the scene from the previous page is both in Albany and in Portland (past and present), this car is both a Pinto (on the outside) and a Subaru (on the inside).  Yes, this was the only car for which I had the necessary access in order to draw it; but there is also a kind of dream logic at work here.   Identities are combined; objects, people, and places change with no overt explanation other than making certain dramatic moments possible. Remember, this sequence started on page 8 with the “dreamer’s” view from the bed.



These are some of the smallest frames, and this is the closest thing to “action” that we get to see in 42 pages; the irregular layout (kind of like the street plan the car is traveling on) was an attempt to emphasize this.  First we see “the approach,” both from the perspective of the mailbox (the stationary) as well as the car (the moving).  Then we see “the arrival,” again from both the car and the mailbox perspective.  In fact, what I am calling “the arrival” seems to be some kind of hand off.  The cassette tape, with its two”lanes” resembling some kind of two way roadway, vanishes into the mail box itself.  And then it seems to emerge from the car’s glove box in the bottom right frame.  Notice that cassette tape is NOT visible in the open glovebox in “the approach” frame.

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This seeming handoff was meant to represent a kind of reverse in the direction of the cassette tape.  It has reached the end; and now it is “auto reversing,” going back to where it started.  The mailbox is kind of like the cassette tape’s swimmer’s flip turn.  The tape has two “lanes.” The tape itself has a ribbon shape, hence, two sides.  So yes, this is at its most simple a demonstration of “out and back.”  It looks like the car is what will bring it back home.  Remember the KS CTX license seen on page 3.  One little, not entirely significant note:  The dingy apartment in which I conceived of this project was in a building that gave itself the august sounding name, The Commodore Apartments - just like the building across the street from the mailbox, visible in the lower left frame.

PAGE 13

​My strongest memory of this page is my father’s sudden emergence into my room as I was working on it.  He was there to tell me that a beloved family member had just died.  My 82 year old great uncle “Butch” had suffered a fatal heart attack as he had been ice dancing with his (allegedly) very pretty 30 something female instructor.  “What a way to go!” we all said at the time.  Funny that I should now associate this page with that event, as it is probably the only “mystical/spiritual” set of frames in the sequence. (I can’t bring myself to write those words without the quotes)



First, what exactly is this mail box?  As I had been collecting photographic images of street scene bric-a-brac for later drawings - on both the East coast and the West - I began to dwell on just how ubiquitous these big blue mail boxes were.  They also seemed extraordinarily well made, and, unlike other street items, they seemed firmly “attached” to their location (with bolts, no less).  I could drop a letter in anyone of these - anywhere in the US! - and I could be assured that it would reach the address I had hand written.  We take this so much for granted;  But if one gave it just a bit of thought, how extraordinary that there is an unseen infrastructure behind every one of these boxes to assure us of precisely this delivery over potentially great distances!



But how do we really know that what we send will get there?  Do we really KNOW?  I mean in the philosophical epistemological sense - do we know?  Not really.  Yes, one can digress into how far sighted the “Founding Fathers” were to have established the post office in The Constitution, or into a discussion of stamp prices and how you and I “pay” for all the postal employees to do such things.  As I write this in 2012 I am accustomed to checking tracking information via the internet; but in 1982, this dropping a letter into the box still seemed to have an element of “Faith” to it.  I did not mean to call attention to the mail or the government (though I really liked being able to include the logo that appeared on mailboxes in these drawings).  I wanted, instead, to use the mail drop as a symbol of faith and the letter as a symbol of prayer.  I have since encountered various religious dream interpretation charts that cited mailboxes and letters as prayer and communication with God.



Back to our narrator.  He has apparently unspooled his consciousness across a series of drawings of the wider world.  He is “taking this wider world in?” He is “becoming one with it?”  All of the above? Whatever one thinks our narrator is up to, he is certainly taking a grand view of himself.  And when his consciousness goes rolling up into that vessel denoting an interaction with the Divine, he is certainly being no less grandiose.  But there is also another item.  A letter addressed to “GUEST” seems poised to go into the same space.  Note the letter has postage (Ah...perhaps a reason that this letter WONT get there - wherever “there,” or “GUEST” is).  Postage is a kind of “proof of purchase seal.”  Insufficient postage means “not paid” - or, by extension (where I was trying to go with this), “unearned.”  There is also no return address.  Perhaps, despite this being couched in terms of communing with the Divine, this is really just a “note to self.”  Is this the letter on the floor on page 2?  Is there ever a response to this letter? Could this be why the mailbox shown on page 5 and then again on page 17 is open (in frustration?) and empty?



And “GUEST?”  Who is that?  I liked the idea that we are all “guests” - temporarily here until we die.  But this is also a cheap word play based on the Walt Whitman passage we encounter later on page 22. There are two Whitman passages underlined there: “What I guess’d at” and “I am afoot with my vision.”  The “afoot” pun is referenced on page 15; but here, this letter -  prayer, message to the living, and note to self, all rolled into one - is an expression of what our narrator has “guess’d” the metaphysical nature of things to be.  Off goes the letter - to God? to the downtown post office? who knows? But a concrete answer will never come.  It is the letter from “Kid Sid’s Context” (our narrator’s self) that lies on the floor on page 2.  Is the Divine immanent or transcendent?  Do those inscrutable counterpane like patterns hold some kind of coded answer? Not really. They are simply what WE tell ourselves that they are.  There might be more; but we will never know for sure.  Again - FAITH.  The letter drops.

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Or does it?  The top frame includes a read out of a camera’s light meter on the right.  Worth noting is the fact that the meters tells us that the light is too low to take this photo.  In the bottom frame the diagonal striped pattern on the back of the camera lets us know that the camera does not have film in it.  This is a completely “sterile” process of looking (to couch this in fertility and reproductive terms); it will not “produce” an image.  What is even more significant is that the letter seems to be visible only through the camera view finder.  Yes, it could be that the process of dropping the letter in the mailbox is happening behind the camera body in the middle frame - and the door has swung shut in the bottom frame; but the cassette tape is no longer visible in the final frame.  The grandiose and overly symbolic process I have spent so much time describing is happening only in someone’s (our narrator’s?) envisioning of it.  Once the camera goes down, we are left looking at what is “really” there.  It is just a mailbox on a night time city street.  The word “REED” on some store front sign hangs in the background, helpfully indicating that this college is the back drop and most likely the ultimate source of this kind of Junior Varsity intellectualization of symbols. I was also referencing Jim Reed, my high school Art teacher.  Reed was an accomplished photo-collagist (among many other things) and had had several exhibitions in NY.  It is no surprise that he is referenced here in the camera series.

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Whatever this cluster of symbols means, it seems apparent that successful communication will not be happening.

PAGE 14

This page is a conventional pull back that allows the wider framing to reveal new and different information; but the top frame is also a self conscious, formal still life.  Putting these three items together (letter, camera, and cassette tape) is a way of trying to evoke a sense of high seriousness and meaning.  More on that in a moment.  We are back in the car apparently; the “hand off” continues.  We are on the side walk, at the farthest reach of the narrator’s bedside fantasy/dream, looking into the array of things in and around the mailbox; simultaneously, we seem to be in the car which is now carrying these 3 items as glove box cargo.


Was this the same camera “photographing” the mailbox?  Wait, wasn’t this the camera in the poster? Again, there is a kind of dream logic at work here; an object can be in multiple places at once.  Maybe even WE can be in multiple places at once: on the sidewalk vs. in the car; in the bedroom looking at the car vs. in the car looking at the bedroom. Even with this ever shifting point of view, one development has emerged.  The cassette tape which, once upon a time, seemed to have gone into the mailbox is now coming out of the cassette cartridge in glove box; More startling, the tape seems to have been cut.

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Back to the still life trio: the camera, the envelope, and the cassette.  The symbolism is not meant to be subtle; and the most basic associations with these objects definitely apply.  I have already tried to describe the more complicated cassette-memory/identity connection.  The cassette, labeled “Interruptions” (like Jim Forni’s and my music splicing projects) has itself been “interrupted” in that the tape has been cut.  Yes, this is meant to be ominous.  While the tape represents a kind of black box of hidden non-visible material (identity), the camera represents the gathering of input: perception. Last, the envelope, a kind of “output” represents the opposite end of this kind of symbol equation: expression.  Our narrator’s world is apparently divided into three parts: perception, identity, and expression.

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This is quite a world view!  Essentially, it is solipsism.  One’s own mind or identity exists; and those things which exist that are NOT one’s own mind (to the extent they can be said to exist for sure) fall into the two categories: that which one’s own mind perceives and that which one’s mind expresses.  I am writing this in the midst of the 2012 Ayn Rand resurgence, and I am reminded of Rand’s paraphrasing of an “unknown” (her word) Greek philosopher. “I will not die, it’s the world that will end.” This glove box still life is basically a monument to our narrator’s epic level of self-centeredness.  On another level the trio breaks down into symbols for the visual (the camera), the auditory (the cassette tape), and the verbal/liguistic (the letter).  If one considers this set of symbols in light of The Who’s “Tommy,” for instance, (eyes covered, ears plugged, cork in mouth) even this set of symbols is pointing to a self centered “inner” life.

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I remember being quite pleased with the abstract quality that the car’s air vents made across the top of the lower frame.  I was becoming quite interested in abstract patterns in realistically rendered objects at the time.  15 cents was the cost for a letter in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  NRTB2 TEST on the camera top was a WTF reference to a speech by the character Mr. Osterpitz in Jim Forni’s play, “There’s a Parrot in Your Mirror.” The directional stipling and cross hatching on the dashboard shows a slight level of improvement.​

My interest in artwork was almost unprecedented in my family.  My work was supported, encouraged, tolerated - choose your word; but I never had the impression that anyone particularly related to my impulse to do it. One rather significant exception was my great aunt Helen “Henny” Alexander (sister of Butch, mentioned before).  She had formally “trained” (back when that word still meant something) with Cecilia Beaux, a rather well known portrait artist of the American Impressionist period. To be brief, Henny was the “real deal,” genuinely talented.  Of course, she was also a female who was raised to be humble about such gifts.  She had stopped actively painting during my lifetime, so I never had much of a chance to speak with her about it.  She was also a rather formal person, who often called me Douglas (my actual first name: Douglas Gillespie Alexander); She, Butch, and Latin professors were the only people who ever did this.  So I was a bit intimidated to speak with her about this. But one day in late 1981 my quite forceful (and busy-body) grandmother deposited me at Henny’s house with an announcement that I had been working on artwork and wouldn’t she, Henny, like to discuss it with me!

Well Henny did discuss it with me.  She patiently asked me what I had been working on.  “A drawing done from the inside of a car,” I confessed.  I think I assumed she would think this was odd.  But, no. She told me how she used to sit inside parked cars in Manhattan back in the 1920’s and 1930’s so that she could unobtrusively sketch the scenes she saw on the streets.  I don’t remember too many of the details of what she said, though I do remember going through a Mary Cassatt book with her.  What I do remember was that she had described looking OUT OF the car, like a naturalist in blind.  She was actively engaged in taking in her environment, and the car was just a tool to help her do it.  I, on the other hand, was consumed with the interior of the car almost to the exclusion of the “external” world. Yes, this gave a bit of insight into the world of my great aunt; but it also made me realize for the first time that my own work had a very peculiar, overly introverted focus.

This drawing, done a bit more than one year later, is a monument to that impulse.  In many ways this was the most ambitious drawing that I had yet attempted.  Much of it consists of very dark swaths of space and cross hatching; but the details that I did include needed to be “just-so” for it to be effective.  The composition is eccentric; but I thought this might be a way to draw more attention to the drawing.  Friends who were around me at the time often cite this panel - probably for just this reason.  I had the help of perspective to help me figure out how to tackle objects like the radio/cassette player and various recessed areas; but much of the interior of a 1981 Subaru GL did not fit easily into squared off space, so I had to spend a great deal of time sitting in the driver’s seat trying to employ that skill that had eluded me, that skill called life drawing.  It was the dead of winter, and I found myself continually having to jump up from my drawing table to re-examine the car’s interior (in full parka and in 10-15 degree weather).

At that time, completing this drawing seemed like a new altitude record on Mt. Everest for me! (however low that “altitude” might be) But it was all really in the service of creating an allegory for short sighted artistic “vision.”  Such seeming attention to detail! But we never get a look out of the car! (like great aunt Henny might have done)

The tape player has “eaten” the cassette tape.  This is a mundane occurrence (as anyone who listened to music in a car in 1982 can attest); but here it is served up as drama, with the severed piece dangling from the glove box.  There are also tiny collections of art supplies throughout the dasboard.  There are multiple technical pens.  There are a varieies of ink: Pelikan, Koh-I-Noor, and Mars-Staedtler.  I liked to use multiple kinds in my drawing in the belief that their different qualities might emphasize textures of various objects.  There is even a paint brush, being damaged by the way it is stuffed into the glove box.
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Apparently the driver (is this still our “narrator?”) may be an artist.  Why is he carrying art supplies in the ready position in a car?  I would never have done this.  technical pens, at least in the way I used them, are not really compatible with this kind of portability; but here these supplies seem to function more as a kind of badge or symbol of taking the supposed “artistic process” out into the world (a world we can’t see above this dashboard). There is a drawing pad visible on the floor on the passenger’s side. If one looks closely, one can see that these are very rough sketches for page 11.  My then girlfriend Leora and I had driven from Portland to San Francisco in September, 1982.  I remember producing perspective sketches very much like those shown here while in the passenger seat during that long drive. (drawing a scene while physically removed from it)
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Finally, there is the rough outline of a sneaker on the gas pedal.  This is not quite a person - but it is as close as we will get during this sequence.  I tried to make it clear that it was a LEFT foot (the wrong one for the accelerator).  This was a play on the underlined Walt Whitman passage on page 22, “I am afoot with my vision.”  This is both a statement of the artist/narrator’s romantic notion of what he is up to - as well as the pun,“I am a foot.” Not only am I “a foot,” but I am the wrong foot.  In other words the artistic expedition has, quite literally, gotten off on the wrong foot.

PAGES 15-16

PAGES 17-18

This drawing, expanded into a more detailed two page spread as it is, is meant to be a bit of a revelation.  We are meant to slow down to have a closer look.  It is not exactly a surprise, but we are finally in the car seen in the window and mirror on pages 3 and 4.  What had started as a grand “venturing out” from that initial room has turned back on itself; when we finally look up from the interior space of the car, we realize we are back exactly where we started.  Once upon a time, we may have imagined that the Pinto’s driver was a distinct person, an entity with a distinct perspective; but here we (the viewer? the narrator? Both?) realize that this perspective is just the proverbial other side of the same coin.



The side view mirror is prominent.  What exactly is back there? Where have we come from?  It looks like a version of that blank-black “Tron” space I mentioned earlier, telephone wires extending out of sight.  The big diagonal slash of the car windows was a self conscious way to try to have multiple “frames” (or bounded 2-D space) within the larger drawing.  The information introduced on pages 3-4 is on the left: the mirror on the bedroom door, the lamp, the briar/bush.  The information on pages 5-6 is on the right: the double windows with the shutters.  I tried to stuff as much detail into this interior space as I could to facilitate this recognition. (including the wallpaper pattern)



Much of the work that I had to do on this drawing consisted of gathering up the bits of architectural information already put forth and constructing them into a whole: the fence, the windows, the shutters, the door with the mirror, the front door the cassette tape went out, the mailbox (still open and empty, by the way), the front walk, the lamp, the bush, the telephone pole.  One detail I had to wrestle with was defining where exactly that octagonally tiled hallway space would be.  I came up with the idea of adding on the window furthest to the left.  Yes, no architect would design a house like this; but with this layout I could indicate a kind of “darkness” (the blackened windows) lurking outside the bedroom door. We will eventually be standing in this space on page 35.



The street sign (a new element not in the crude drawing of pages 3-4) reads SE Lambert (where I was living in Portland when I was drawing this in March, 1983) and NW 22nd Place (my old crappy studio from March 1982).  This address is a physical impossibility (the address can’t be Southeast and Northwest at the same time); but the point is that this is a Portland (or West Coast) address.  The street scene on page 11 had a 100% Albany, NY (or East Coast) address.  Placing Portland streets here complicates matters a touch more, as this house is kind of a work in progress that was initially based on my parents’ old house in Albany. Basically, I was trying to assemble as many personally archetypal images for “home” as I could.



There is a general level of improved skill that is visible here.  “Leafiness,” as I called it a ways back, is something I seemed to have found some basic ways of represent.  I remember feeling pleased with the bush at the left and the white leaves on black background of the tree at the top right.  The range of textures has increased. There also seems to be an ability to render finely detailed items with greater assurance.  The downspout and the brick house down the street are two good examples; however, I did make a self-conscious decision to render the entire scene in a peculiar perspective scheme.  Every drawing so far has been constructed in a very simple one point perspective system.  The vanishing point for this drawing, for example, is off to the right.  The view out the front of the windshield narrows down this funnel of converging parallel lines toward it (in other words, the back corner of the house is smaller than the front).  But, the view out of the side window is different.  This side of the house is “full frontal.” Its left side does NOT recede into foreshortening as it would in a more dynamic 2 point perspective system.  Why?  It is being presented, poster-like, as readable information rather a true visual rendering (remember, I was going for recognition of a "return" in this drawing) rather than how a house would really look.  The next 8 pages form a more drawn out montage of images that illustrate this "return."  Overly exaggerated two point perspective, not to mention “aerial” views will be theatrically introduced during this next chapter.  We are about to go into a more self-consciously complicated visual space.

PAGE 19

The images in the top frames on page 19 and page 25 are almost identical.  I meant for them to be “the same” - in that way that the first frame and last frame of the entire drawing sequence are “the same.”  When I was working on page 25, however, I couldn’t quite help myself and decided to “improve” it.  Page 19 has shading that is dominated by parallel lines and slashes.  Page 25 has shading that is dominated by stippling. Oh well.



In the same way that the camera images at the beginning and end of the entire sequence make possible a kind of narrative loop, these identical images here are meant to create the possibility an even tighter version of this same kind of “loop.”  There was a definite mood I wanted the repetition to evoke: “Careful where you look next (at the top of page 25) or you might end up back on page 19 in a kind endless repetition from which narrative escape would be impossible!”  There is a torrent of fresh new information that begins on page 26.  The point is that one could avoid these revelations by riding a reverse narrative arc (think of the chutes in the board game “Chutes and Ladders”) back to where one has already been.



Or are these two images really the same? Think of Andy Warhol films of people vacuuming for eight hours - is every moment “the same?” Another point I was emphasizing was that the image, as presented the second time around, would not be the same because its context would be different.  On page 25 the next frame is the interior of the car (again); but here on page 19 the next frame is a close up on the exterior of the car, a view that will begin a pull back over the next two pages, ending up back in “the room.”  The idea of repeating images was one I wanted to frequently introduce so that a viewer might be accustomed to looking for it when the repetition of the image on page 8 appears again on page 26, albeit in a slightly different state.



Composing the image in the double windows to be just so was extremely important here.  I wanted all the items from pages 5-6 to be visible so that the idea of subsequently zooming in on the house would seem a natural next step.  Instead of this anticipated zooming, we get a look at the car’s exterior.  The windows do not reveal anything of the interior.  No one is visible (of course). Where we might expect to see an image of a person behind the wheel we instead see a chaotic scribble of tangled of ink strokes.  The one place where we have seen this pattern before was on the surface of the tape deck.



The exterior of the car is deliberately framed in this tight close up.  I wanted the patterns of automotive materials to create a kind of abstract two dimensional surface.  One of the side effects of my photographing street bric-a-brac had been that I was inadvertently capturing these kinds of abstract layouts.  The summer of 1983 (I was working on this in June) was a period when I was intensely interested in this just this kind of abstract pattern making.  In addition, the neatness of the car’s exterior was something that I wanted to contrast with the chaotic scribbles of the interior.  “People, unlike cars, are complicated and chaotic,” seems to be the message.

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I spent an excessive amount of time trying to get the measurements of the car windows and interior just right.  The two page dashboard spread on pages 15-16 was highly detailed, but it is seen from a nearly impossible point of view.  I wanted this to be as close to the precise view from the driver’s seat as was possible. The odometer gets excessive attention.  The electric feed to the house, the car antenna, and phone lines are also excessively prominent details.  I think I was a bit infatuated by the effects of the white against the night sky’s black.

PAGE 20

This page is a bit of a reprise of the car/window/mirror drawings back on pages 3-4.  Instead of the car’s vanishing (as on pages 3-4), here the car is shown in the same location.  In this sequence it is the viewer’s location which moves instead.  The top frame is a continuation of the framing from the previous page which showed only “car.”  Here, it is the car plus roadway.  In the middle frame it is car plus roadway plus neighborhood (yards and houses); and,finally, in the bottom frame it is car plus roadway plus neighborhood plus house interior.  Is the car “the same?”  Like the samples of recorded music juxtaposed on so called “Interruptions Tapes,” the context is what makes the difference.  The repetition of the house image - in precisely the same position within both the middle and the bottom frame - is another way of driving home the whole “Is it the SAME?” or “Is it different?” issue.

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It is worth noting that the house across the street from our “narrator’s” room has a much closer resemblance to the house where I grew up.  Yes, there are no shutters, and the trim is different; but the hedge, fence, and tree in the side yard are a complete recreation of my old house.

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The items that demand the most attention on this page are the book titles revealed in the bottom frame.  These are the same books we saw from the other direction on pages 5-6.  Most of them are references to the work of various people (artists, writers) who had strongly influenced me at the time.  See the “Influences” page of this website to read more about them.  “Pura Casta” (pure and chaste in Spanish) was a prominent phrase in series of posters featured as a backdrop in Luis Garcia’s “Nova 2.”  I took the proximity of the bull poster to be a form of commentary that might  indicate that “Superman vs. Spiderman” was bullshit.  “Final Harvest” is a book of Emily Dickinson’s poems.  The ones dealing with mortality (and response to it) particularly interested me.  A quote from Emerson’s “The Poet” (yet another essay on the “proper” way to be an artist) was also often on my mind.  Finally, Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” had been quite a revelation for me: the novel assertions that photography implied a kind of mentally violent willfulness, an inherent surreality, and a detachment on the part of its practitioners.  I thought that many of the things Sontag described about photography might also be true, in a larger and more general sense, of our “narrator’s” own aesthetic sensibilities.  The inclusion of these titles calls far too much attention to them for the purposes of the narrative. They were really meant to function simply as a kind of “book wallpaper” here.  I have reproduced some of the quotes here 1) because I like them and 2) because it might help reveal why this stuff got stuck in this drawing.

from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet”





“Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. The morning-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and he believes should stand for the same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And the mystic must be steadily told, -- All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, -- universal signs, instead of these village symbols, -- and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ of language.”  (my emphasis)

​from Susan Sontag's  ON PHOTOGRAPHY





“…photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.”

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“Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.”



“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”



“Photographs do not seem to be statements about the world so mush as pieces of it, miniatures of reality, that anyone can make or acquire.”



“While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency.”

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“…photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects.”



“…photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.”

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 “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”



“…as a mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.”



“photographs… help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.”



“The camera]… makes real what one is experiencing….A way of certifying experience…converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”



“Photography is become one of the principle devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.”



“Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention….The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene.”



“[Photographing]… is a way of at least tacitly….encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening.”



“The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—all activities that…can be conducted from a distance, and with some
detachment.”

Classic college student reading mix of pretense and immaturity

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